Talk:Italian dialects

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Contents 1 Italian dialects 2 Merge?! 3 Languages or Dialects 4 Naples 5 Clarification 6 Dialects of Italian and languages of Italy

[edit] Italian dialects

Why did you change "dialetti d'Italia" to "dialetti dell'Italia" (I assume it was you Jorgengb, even though I haven't checked the history)? If it was to be more specific, well ok, but I think "dialetti d'Italia" should still be mentioned as an alternative, as it is just a much more natural phrase to say. And all in all, I don't quite feel the definite article adding so much... definiteness to the term, in this case.

Also, as I hinted to in Talk:Milanese, I don't think "Italian dialects" should be abolished and verboten when talking about things that are "dialects of Italy": you know, the word "Italian" doesn't just refer to a language, but is also an adjective that simply means... "of Italy" (or "of the Italians"), no more no less!

On these grounds, I'd make the introductory paragraph something like "Italian dialects is a broad and sometimes ambiguous term used to refer both to the dialects of Italian (short explanation) and to the dialects of Italy (short explanation). These latter terms ought to be used when the former creates ambiguity."

LjL 14:24, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Oh, well, I see that you're a faster typist than me... ;-) LjL 14:25, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I see your points, and it was actually with all our previous discussion in mind that I decided the best way to make things clear was to introduce a disambiguating page:

Italian dialects (disambig.)

"Italian dialects"="Dialects of Italian" --> Dialects of Italian

"Italian dialects"="Dialects of Italy" --> Dialects of Italy

I also tried to keep the core of that caveat in each of the three pages.

(And I was looking forward to some feedback from you :-) )

Btw.: I missed the point in your last line about being a faster typist ?!?

--Jorgengb 21:59, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Nevermind, it's just that you've edited the article while I was editing the talk page... and after I got back to the article I realized you had already changed it roughly the way I had proposed :=)

Ok - cf. the Milanese talk page --Jorgengb 13:12, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Some days ago I also lost an edit because you were editing the same page and I did not notice Wikipedia telling me there was an edit conflict... we just seem to be online at the same hours editing the same articles ;-)

Hmmm... how does Wikipedia handle such conflicts? --Jorgengb 13:12, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

By the way, don't you hate the way talk pages work in Wikipedia? All these ::: make them such a mess! For discussing, I'd much rather like something threaded like in a newsgroup or a forum.

Yes! I was actually going to propose you to start from scratch at the bottom of the page (well, the Milanese page, actually, where the situation is much worse...) --Jorgengb 13:12, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Anyway, it's all fine with the way you've changed things. I just don't think the term "Italian dialects" should be so strongly discouraged, but that's points of view (anyway, those who want to use the term can keep using it, it's a free web ;-)

Now I'm nitpicking, but I'd remove the "correctly" from the Ethnologue sentence: it makes it sound like you're arguing with somebody who thinks that classification is incorrent -- which might actually be near to the truth, but feels slightly NPOV on Wikipedia. If the reader doesn't know how much Ethnologue's word is worth, they can click on the link and find out.

LjL 01:08, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

ok. Or -- what about sthg. not so strong as "correctly" but a bit more than [] (=removing the adverb completely) ? --Jorgengb 13:12, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I've put a stern "thus". Read the sentence again, I don't think it's too bad: it says that "dialects of Italy" are languages, different from Italian, and thus they're recognized as such by authorities. Personally I think it sends the message. LjL 22:12, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I've also added that "in linguistics, this use should be discouraged". Really, if I were the average John reading this page, I'd find the fact that saying "Italian dialects" is verboten quite weird. It's better to restrict the scope of that sentence to the field where it belongs (linguistics, even though you could well say that this is an article about linguistics, so it should be obvious...).

[edit] Merge?!

After these poor pages have been through all this mess, while we tried to tidy them up a bit by separating them as logically as possible, you ask us to merge them? My vote is certainly NO WAY! LjL 22:08, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'd say, keep the disambig page - while not ideal (but I'm not sure what would be....) it's certainly an improvement. Man vyi 29 June 2005 08:45 (UTC)

I agree, too. In Italy there are many dialects that aren't derivations from Italian language. The most known non-italian dialects in Italy are those spoken in Sardegna (Sardinia), Alto-Adige (Sudtirol) and Friuli. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 192.167.38.107 (talk • contribs) 14 November 2005.

I am for a merge under Dialects of Italy. Italian dialects and even worse Dialects of Italian are misleading. Standard Italian has come in widespread usage only with the introduction of television in Italy. There has not been the material time to form dialects, and the present ones all predate standard Italian itself. In fact, Standard Italian is based on (some specific) dialects, not the other way around. 192.167.38.107, notice that Sardinian, German and Friulian are considered languages (not sure which army Friulian has, however). --Orzetto 22:56, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Languages or Dialects

I think that this paragraph is not really reflecting a npov. "Certain people assert that some dialects have language status (sometimes for political reasons, such as the Northern League)." I'm just wondering what the Northen League has to do with a linguistics article. Unless we insert a separate paragraph about political implications I can't see the reason why that has to be there. Or should we perhaps add what Alleanza Nazionale or Democratici di Sinistra think of the matter as well??? I am not sure of what "language status" means either... perhaps "official language status"? "According to Ethnologue, some of these idioms (normally termed dialects by their own users) can belong to different branches of the family of Romance languages. Some of these variations can be different enough to be classified as separate languages. However, there is a substantial disagreement within the scholarly community over a consistent set of parameters for that end." According to Ethnologue and to most linguists these idioms belong to different branches of Romance languages. Therefore how can we say that they are dialects of italian?? If they're not dialect of Italian as many have (correctly) pointed out in this discussion and they're not separate languages, they're dialect of which language then?? There is no "substantial disagreement" among linguists. The disagreement is at a political level. I think the whole paragraph as it is is just useless. The paragraph "Dialects of Italian and dialects of Italy" already clarifies this point. IMHO I think it should be deleted. Or re-written. I'd like to read your thoughts as well... Lorenzino 14:47, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Italian Dialects is probably a better term than Dialects of Italian--as the discussion and article point out--since the latter implies that dialects come from the standard language, which is not the case here. To be truly descriptive, you would have to have something cumbersome such as "Varieties of Neo-Latin spoken in Italy" which (1) avoids the stigmatized word "dialect" in favor of the term "variety" of language, a usage preferred by many linguists today, and (2) excludes all of those non-Latin languages spoken on the Italian peninsula--Greek, Albanina, German, etc. Somewhere in here, there should be room for the old line that "the difference between a language and a dialect is that a language has an army." Jeffmatt 06:24, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Naples

The large amount of mixed marriages, especially in large industrial cities as Milan and Turin, resulted in a generation that could confidentially speak only Standard Italian, and normally only understand some of their parents' dialects.

Does this apply to Naples as well? Has Italian largely replaced or is it replacing Neapolitan in everyday discourse? I know it’s part of the south, but it still also is a major port city.

Italian has replaced Neapolitan for years. Now in everyday usage persists a distinguishable Neapolitan accent, with some typical features of old Neapolitan but largely similar to standard Italian and absolutely intelligible with it. --89.97.35.70 20:04, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Re "Does this apply to Naples, as well?" Briefly, no. First, what produces speakers of a standard language instead of local variation (dialect) is a matter of some debate; "mixed marriages" may be one of them, as might the "leveling" influence of modern communication. In any event, in Naples there doesn't seem to be (to my eyes and ears--and I have lived in Naples for 30 years) any particular drop-off in the dialect. Neapolitan has a particularly strong tradtion of poetry, song and theater, which may account for some of that persistence. Jeffmatt 05:33, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Clarification

I am not a linguist nor do I pretend to understand the evolution of the Italian language. However, it is very clear to me that there is a clear distinction missing from this article- and that leads to much confusion and argument: The article should clarify between modern Italian dialects- which are what most native speakers speak today in addition to standard Italian- and the traditional languages of pre-modern Italy- of which there are very few native speakers today. A case in point would be Venetian and Venetian Italian. The vast majority of people who speak "Venetian" in Italy today actually speak Venetian Italian (or Italianized Venetian?). Ever since the mid-19th Century most local Italian languages began to be influenced by Standard Italian. Of course, with unification this progression intensified and, today, it would be difficult to find speakers of historic Venetian or Sicilian. I believe that these regional languages gave way to so much Italianization in the early 20th century (and this intensified during the 1950s and 1960s) that most dialects spoken in Italy today are, in fact, dialects of Italian. 66.183.217.31 00:18, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dialects of Italian and languages of Italy

First of all I would like to point out that there is a common misconception about the words language and dialect. A language is a way of expressing ideas in a unique way whereas a dialect is a more or less modified version of a language that presents differences in pronunciation and vocabulary. The fact a dialect of a region is uncomprehensible to a speaker of a dialect of another region should be sufficient to define the two dialects as two languages.

When we talk about dialects and languages in Italy, we should talk about languages of Italy or dialects of Italian keeping in mind that the two things are not the same (dialects of Italian is a subset of languages of Italy). For instance, some of the dialects of Italian are Emiliano and Romanesco while some of the languages of Italy are Sardo and Ladin.

This article should change its title to Dialects of Italian and it should be linked under List of languages of Italy which should be renamed Languages of Italy. It would be nice to add an Italian version of Dialects of Italian named Dialetti d'Italia. I think this article is not really well-structured. This article should be reworked. Particular attention should be placed on regional versions of the standard Italian.

The fact that the Northern League uses the local dialect has nothing to do with this article. It is diverging from the main point of the article which is creating a list of dialects of Italian.

ICE77 -- 195.212.29.67 13:54, 23 March 2007 (UTC)